During the Cultural Revolution, people were sentenced to death or outright murdered because of one wrong sentence. In China today writers do not lose their lives over their poems or articles; however, they are jailed for years. My friend Liu Xiaobo for example will stay in prison till 2020; even winning the Nobel Peace Prize could not help him. In prison those lucky enough not to be sentenced to hard labor play “blind chess” to kill time AND TO TRAIN THE BRAIN NOT TO RUST. Freedom of expression is still a luxury in China. The firewall is everywhere, yet words can fly above it and so can our thoughts. My column, like the blind chess played by prisoners, is an exercise to keep our brains from rusting and the situation in China from indifference.

Tienchi Martin-Liao is the president of the Independent Chinese PEN Center. Previously she worked at the Institute for Asian Affairs in Hamburg, Germany, and lectured at the Ruhr-University Bochum from 1985 to 1991. She became head of the Richard-Wilhelm Research Center for Translation in 1991 until she took a job in 2001 as director of the Laogai Research Foundation (LRF) to work on human rights issues. She was at LRF until 2009. Martin-Liao has served as deputy director of the affiliated China Information Center and was responsible for updating the Laogai Handbook and working on the Black Series, autobiographies of Chinese political prisoners and other human rights books. She was elected president of the Independent Chinese PEN Center in October 2009 and has daily contact with online journalists in China.

In this week’s column, Tienchi Martin-Liao questions the motives and sincerity of Song Binbin, a scholar and former Red Guard, who has recently officially apologized for her involvement in the attack and death of her school’s principal in 1966, at the height of the Cultural Revolution.

As history looms large, tensions flare up between China and Japan. Tienchi Martin-Liao looks at the now infamous events of December 26, 2013: China’s celebration of Mao Zedong’s 120th birthday and Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe’s visit to Yasukuni shrine, a World War II memorial.

Independent Chinese PEN Center president, Tienchi Martin-Liao, reflects on the five-year anniversary of imprisonment of dissident writer and Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo, his wife’s prolonged, Kafkaesque house arrest, the calls for solidarity from Chinese human rights activists, and the power of words.

On November 15, the Chinese Communist Party finally abolished its notorious system of labor camps called laojiao (reeducation through labor). While Chinese human rights activists welcome the news, they also called for the banning of ‘black jails and other rogue camouflaged measures of laojiao.’

In China, according to Tienchi Martin-Liao, journalists face two major problems: censorship from officials who issue instructions on how and whether or not to report a story, and corruption in the form of “red envelopes” (bribes), which have become many journalists’ main source of income.

On the rise and fall (for now) of the popular Butcher Shop, an innovative philanthropic e-commerce project that provides financial aid to families of political prisoners. The venture is organized by Rice-Delivery-Party, a writer/activist collective led by the author and blogger Ye Fu.

Tienchi Martin-Liao chronicles the events surrounding the detention of 16-year-old Chinese netizen Yang Hui, who faces a possible charge of “inciting trouble” under a newly amended law aimed at stifling free speech on the internet.

In the wake of a recent wave of arrests aimed to smother free speech in China, Tienchi Martin-Liao examines the laws most frequently used to charge dissidents and influential social media voices, and how they’ve been modified to include new offenses.

China’s president calls for all media to train journalists on “Marxist news concepts” – but what does that mean exactly? According to Tienchi Martin-Liao, the new move coincides with the recent crackdown on dissidents as the government attempts to handle economic anxiety.

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About Sampsonia Way

Sampsonia Way is an online magazine sponsored by City of Asylum/Pittsburgh that seeks to protect and advocate for writers who may be endangered, to educate the public about threats to writers and literary expression, and to create a community in which endangered writers thrive and literary culture is a valued part of life.